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what is the advantage of 11.5 over 12?

0.5cm smaller.

According to this [1] interview because it's approx the same size as a cassette tape.

[1] (pdf, dutch) http://docs.mfbfreaks.com/div/De_Ingenieur_Lou_Ottens.pdf

Philips decided on it because it would make the case closer in size to cassette tapes, and they already had a factory capable of producing it. I guess 12 cm would have required more retooling, which would cost them some of their advantage over Sony.

Source: https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/why-is-a-cd-74-minu...

"Philips engineer Kees A. Schouhamer Immink writes that Philips were pushing for the CD to be close in size to the cassette tape, whereas Sony were pushing for a slightly larger 12cm disc, partially because they knew that Philips already had a factory capable of producing 11.5cm CDs and if they could decide on 12cm as the industry standard then they would erase Philips' head start in manufacturing."

Interesting that the universal standard was created for such a petty reason. I was hoping to hear that there was some subtle but huge difference in 0.5cm. But no, it's just to screw Philips over, and we all have to play along.

It’s not like Sony and Philips are friends. They’re competitors. And the reason Philips wanted 11.5 cm is because it gave them an advantage, aka just to screw Sony over. This is normal business, not some moral failing.

Actually it is a moral failing. All that equipment had to be end of lifed earlier and much more work had to be put in. More garbage, more wasted energy. I can't see how that is anything but a moral failing.

I agree, and am glad you recognize it as such. When Sony erased Philips' "head-start", they obsoleted an investment made with the finite endowment of global resources (not to mention time). It's an underhanded tactic which disadvantages everyone to advantage a few.

I, for one, appreciate the additional 2MB of storage that gave us. /s

I wonder how many more minutes of audio 0.5 cm gets us?

If you ignore the hole in the middle and approximate the number of minutes to be proportional to the area of a circle then it's ~6 minutes.

See also JVC's "VHS" vs Sony's "BetaMax". It is the way of standards warfare.

It definitely annoyed me that media cabinets that held an even number of cassette tape drawers "across" would not fit an integral number of CD drawers.

> It is the way of standards warfare.

Is it the way, or merely a way, and only the way so far in our brief history? I hate to see defeatism around gross inefficiencies like these.

Philips engineers some good stuff, my last flat screen was 12 years old. The only reason I retired it was because instead of waiting for my friend to come over I decided to move it myself (it was pretty hefty). Lost my grip and boom no more flatscreen (to fix it was far more than it was worth with a cracked screen). I wonder if my TCL will last anywhere near as long, it still had a great picture and it didn't need a soundbar like my new much cheaper TCL :) .

Timmer, the Philips CEO at the time, is on record [0] saying it had to do with the max recording length.

He claims Sony's CEO liked one particular recording of Beethoven's 9th so much, he insisted it had to fit on a CD. And this particular recording was 74mins, 33 seconds.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kytmE4mrXWM, Dutch

edit: It was not Timmer, but Kees Immink and Hans Mons @ 8:25

Immink says the myth is that Sony exec Ohga's wife insisted on the 74 minute length, based on a very slow performance of Beethoven 9, which normally isn't that long. But he also says it's not true. This is in his classic paper on the history of the CD.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322951358_Shannon_B...

Whenever I hear people talk about the superior sound quality of vinyl my response is "Yeah, there's nothing quite like the sound of a rock being dragged over bumpy plastic!"

Let me translate to what they are trying to say: "the dynamic range in the music mastered for vinyl sounds good".

Yes, by buying a vinyl record from the 70s (especially from renowned labels), you're buying a sound that is free from the digital remastering craze of the following decades.

Is that really true though? If they have the original recordings (which have a much better dynamic range than vinyl) the digitally remastered ones can indeed be more true to the sound of the original recording.

They can be, for sure, but in my experience it's hit and miss. For instance, I believe the CD reissues of Living Stereo records (from the master tape) are very good. On the contrary, I once bought the integral of Hector Lavoe, remastered, and the sound was very disappointing, with excessive highs giving an unnatural quality to the sound. Whereas my experience with vinyl records from Decca/London pressed in the 70s is consistently good. If you're willing to experiment and take risks, you can probably find good and bad everywhere. I was suggesting a disappointment-minimizing path...

Well a lot of CD's swapped out loudness (amplitude) for dynamic range and really they aren't much better than vinyl. So there's a bit of truth to it. A properly mastered CD is far superior to vinyl in a technical sense. Not being an audiophile though I don't mind either as long as the record ain't scratchy and it's not a cheap deck with crappy electronics. Obviously the best "sound" is in the ear of the beholder and some people prefer the sounds of their child/teen years to a higher fidelity version available on CD.

> That never worked with tape.

80’s thrash metal and tapes go together really well. The cutting, trebly sound of tapes really works with the staccato, percussive sounds of bands like Slayer, Megadeth, Metallica, etc.

There’s been a resurgence of bands putting out limited runs on cassette. I think a lot of this is nostalgia (often from people too young for much exposure to tape). Cassette sound quality is definitely inferior, but that can be adopted as part of the overall sound.

There's also lo-fi hip hop, where adding bad radio, tape or vinyl static to songs is basically a given (as the name kind of implies I guess).

I think it makes a kind of sense, in the same way white noise can be soothing

lo-fi basement dweller black metal is another one, I mean feast your ears on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU. Ironically, that album has been released on everything; cassettes, FLAC, 4 lp wooden box set, and a wooden USB stick with 128kbit MP3. The medium is part of the art?

Anyway, taste aside I can appreciate this particular artist and their work, it's a lot of midrange noise but the musical elements (mostly percussion tbh) emerge from the swamp with a good listen.

A very long time ago some of the Darkthrone tracks I downloaded from Napster were corrupted and had glitches/noise in them. I didn't know they were glitches, and I listened to this for years and thought it sounded great. I actually regret not having those "damaged" MP3s any more.

60s-era blues is another good example. The recording equipment at the time certainly wasn't bad, but it was not yet perfected. It added a certain sound to recordings from the time that I kind of miss in later recordings.

Way back when mp3 encoders weren't very good, I could hear some of the compression artifacts that were common in the commonly used reference encoder.

I pointed out that sound to someone who thought it was part of the song and forever cursed them with also hearing them everywhere. It's like learning about kerning ...

Or leaming about keming...

You may enjoy these pieces a local ceramic artist made for me:

https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb

That yellow tin is just ... evil. You are a bad person and you should feel bad :D

Compact Disc audio is uncompressed.

Wouldn't you be able to get the same effect by applying some digital filter to the music? Same goes for warmer sound some people claim for analog amplifiers. I would think you should be able to tune your digital devices to produce the same sound.

In theory you could compress and add some flutter. [1]

The problem is, you don't have access to the master - if you try to apply this filter on top of a final mix destined for CD/digital, it won't sound the same as tape, and will deteriorate the signal even more. That's why some bands still release on cassete, you actually need to mix w/ tape in mind.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS34GN4UHpQ&ab_channel=MrAud...

That's how lo-fi gets produced.

This is one of the more popular tools for that job: https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...

Or you Just add that sound in the mix yourself...

To me this is analogous to the incredibly common practice of applying scanned grain from 16mm or 35mm film stock in digital cinematography workflows, making the result “feel” more like film — or our expectations and perceptions of cinema. Sometimes high fidelity media isn’t what we really want.

Meanwhile digitization of actual film is manipulated to make it look more like digital cinema, with the grain and scratches removed, interpolated to 60 fps with jitter and shake suppressed.

I went to see Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight projected in all its original glory. I didn’t like the experience: the jitter, the scratches, the flicker of the blindingly bright snow... And the movie itself didn’t seem all that good.

I watched it three times on a blue-ray I bought a year later, and I loved everything about it, every time.

I think it's for more of us who are old folks for nostalgic reasons and cinephiles who want to see what it felt/looked like back in the day. It's not meant for regular people or younger audiences who aren't into the grindhouse nostalgia.

Or adding old photo filters to instagram. It gives it a nostalgic feel but you may regret it if you don't save the originals :)

I still have a cassette player in my work out room but I don't think I've had a cassette in it for over a decade. The radio and speakers still sound great though and the CD player in it works fine :)

I would slightly disagree with him about CDs: there are some annoying high-frequency noises from a typical CD drive motor.

Higher-end ones probably have some buffering.

You can always mimic the sound you'd get from analog media using a CD the same way you can emulate a CRT using a modern HDR high-resolution display with fidelity well beyond our ability to differentiate them. With a high-end GPU we can do CRT emulation in real time.

That's not what the person you're replying to is talking about though - they're stating that the motor that spins the disc is causing interference in the signal.

(I have a hard time imagining that it's worse than the electric motors used to drive vinyls or cassette tapes, but if it's there it's there I suppose)

IIRC I recall the lack of 'warm tones' on early CDs was due to the technique they used with early CDs to transfer the audio from tape to the CD.

I know my old CDs very much had a weird sorta cold, almost distant sound and I felt that later CDs did not.

Was it not the sound of the 80s that was responsible for that? (See "In The Air Tonight".)

No, it was the inability to oversample given the technology of the day. Because the actual sampling happened at 44.1 KHz, you needed a brick wall filter to eliminate any signals past 20 KHz before sampling in order to avoid aliasing. Analogue brick wall filters do horrible things to the phase of the signal, screwing up the time relationships between tones and overtones. It was several years before gentler filtering and sampling at higher frequencies, then downconvertig to 44.1 KHz, made CDs listenable at all on a decent system - long enough for there to be a considerable catalogue of awfulness, and for a lot of people to have made up their minds that CDs had to suck. ("The sound of the '80s" had little to do with, say, classical and jazz recordings, which were subject to the same sampling problems.)

It applied to most any type of music on early CDs. They seemed to just really do badly converting it from tape to CD, but improved a great deal as time went on.

Well, vinyl is indeed "warmer audio" in a sense, in that it is more compressed and has higher saturation (due to the format properties), both of which can sound naturally pleasant. (It's also more tactile, which adds to the warmness psychologically).

CDs didn't have that great dynamic range or noise floor anyway (they were copied from -usually- 2inch master tapes, so tapes were still involved, and thus noise). 24bit/48 or 96Hz, on the other hand, now we're talking (but still most people wouldn't hear much of a difference in most mixed music, and in the majority of cheap headphones/speakers).